keeping it simple may be the hardest thing you do

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One click reporting

Reporting is an essential part of any training. This is especially true in the case of training where all the employees or students are required to complete the course. Moodle provides some standard reports that cater for most users needs. Totara on the other hand has an additional Report Builder that allows for even more reporting. With Report Builder you can create and save your own reports and run them whenever you need them.

But what if you need a report that isn’t available through the normal methods provided by Moodle orTotara. Well then you call up a developer and they cobble something together for you. The thing is, both Moodle and Totara have so much tracking data, that building custom reports then becomes rather cool – in a nerdy way.

A while back I posted about a custom course format I built for a client. The client needed a single course with a number of topics. The users would be divided into two groups – A and B. Group A would do topics 1, 2 & 4, while Group B would do 1, 3 & 4. The user is said to have completed the course when they have completed their required topics – based on their group.

Since no standard report would ever work, I build a custom report that would allow an admin to extract the data from the database, build the report, write it to Excel and finally mail it to the recipients, all by simply clicking a button. One click reporting. As mentioned above, there is so much tracking data, that building custom reports then becomes fun. In my case I landed up building my own Report Generator module and listed all the custom reports available. I included a sample row of data so that the administrator would be able to see what the output would look like.